Well 10 days with my pixel 4, and I am going back to my note 10+, and listing it for sale.
Pros
1.I was totally wrong about Soli. The motion sense gimmick is so broken, that it is embarrassing, however the face unlock is rock solid. Really impressive, and an improvement over a FP sensor.
2.Google's software chops are still really great for the features on this phone. Really nice refined UI, with lots of little helpful touches like autofilling 2 factor authorization texts, etc.
3.Call screening is so underrated. It is something that should be a Marquee feature. I get a above average amount of solicitation due to work, but am also always receiving calls from unknown numbers. It is perfect to just send someone to.the screening vs voicemail.
4.Squeeze for assistant is great. I never use it on my note because it take a awkward swipe and hold to access. Having a physical implementation is great.
5.Camera is still unmatched imo. I have taken some truly great photos with my note 10+ that got tons of likes and praise on social media. However I have also taken a ton of mushy, blurry badly exposed ones as well. Even with gcam.
Where the pixel shines is the consistency. It is tack sharp 95% of the time, and shoots pictures that almost always look great. I will dearly miss the camera.
6.Lots of other things that are really right in no particular order.
Great sounding speaker
Very pleasant tuning on the OLED. Approaching iPhone levels of refinement
Nice to have a small phone with great performance
Updates hot off the presses.
Now unfortunately for everything I liked about the pixel 4 I can seriously not recommend it after living with it for a few days. I experience the most absolutely deal breaking issues on any of the past 10 phones I have owned in the past few years.
Cons:
1.Glitchy terrible software optimization that led to REALLY bad lag. I am talking tap a key on the keyboard and it registers 2-3 seconds later. Crashing apps, Hard crashed that forced a reboot. Terrible all around.
A hard reset back to factory with every app added back in manually helped, but did not fix the issue.
2.Unreliably bad battery life. There is something that was causing a phantom drain on my pixel 4. If you just used it fresh off the charger it would actually do pretty well with SOT. But being out and about slaughtered the battery. I would have it in my pocket and not interact with it at all for 3 hours, look down and 40% of the battery was just gone.
Setting it to 60hz, no AOD, no motion sense, even packahe disabling a bunch of stuff didn't help. Coming from the stellar note 10+ battery it was 3 steps backwards, and I will never go back to relying on a battery bank every day.
3.The incident that was the absolute last straw is the reception issues I have been having. I am in the middle of some pretty hectic times and it has just decided to start dropping calls. So bad that I had to call someone back 5 times yesterday in a perfect reception area.
Then out of nowhere it decided on its own to switch to a different APN and left me with no data yesterday.
Perhaps I got a dud phone. I will be RMAimh it for the clear conscious before I sell it off. However this was probably the worst phone experience I have had in almost 10 years.
I will not be back any time soon.
